Top 6 Practical Mind Map Uses in Business Field

Mind mapping is widely used in the business field with the feature of information visualization. Here presents most popular business uses of the mind map.

Mind mapping is an effective brainstorming tool for information visualization and collection. Providing a rapid idea gathering method, mind map performs well in creative association and convergence, problem-solving, analyzing, and conference management etc. Now we would like to share with you top 6 practical business uses of mind maps.

For Project Management

A project manager's job involves planning and organizing time and resources, tracking workflows, coordinating task groups, and monitoring the whole process. At the same time, they need to find balanced solutions to solve complicated problems. Mind maps are always popular for project managers to visualize project priorities, task breakdowns, dependencies, resources, durations, and lead times, etc., and this information can be translated to a Gantt chart, so you have two visual perspectives to track your project. What's more, the excellent information gathering and brainstorming abilities of mind maps provide high efficiency in the project analyzing, decision making and problem-solving.

For Decision Making

Making the right decision is vital for business leaders as a single decision can be responsible for the success or downfall of your business. Before coming up with a decision, one needs to compare different options, predict outcomes and forecast risks. Many leaders like collaborative decision-making to get more insight and feedback from the team members. Therefore, consensus might be difficult to reach with too many opinions around. That's why mind mapping is needed. Mind maps are great in aiding the decision-making process. You can put a decision in the center of the map and brainstorm everything associated with the decision, such as positive results, negative results, limitations, risks, possibilities, etc. Map out pros and cons, and assess the value of the choices. When everything is visualized on a map, you get clearer thoughts and make better evaluations for your final determination.

For Time Planning

A well-organized time plan is essential for a team to manage the schedule effectively. When in the business project, time planning should be concerned from team members to the manager as everything put off might influence the whole process. Mind maps, in short, are more logical than any other visualization tools for schedule planning. The radial and hierarchical structure of mind map help break down your project into smaller and manageable task pieces. You can set a deadline for each task, and assign certain people to finish the task so everyone in the project team could use this time map to track both their own time schedule and the whole project time plan. Take below weekly plan for a reference, you can not only check the daily schedule clearly but have an overall view of a whole week. Another advantage for mind map is that you can add Priority and Progress icons to mark your process visually.

For Strategic Planning

Mind mapping, as an advanced analysis tool, is widely used in the strategic planning process. It is useful when a community needs to analyze the business status quo and find solutions to solve their dilemmas. A strategic planning mind map covers several business theories and can be dug further for different planning practices. Widely fields of business analysis plan include business environmental analysis of SWOT, DESTEP, and PESTLE analysis etc., business strategy analysis of Business Model, Six Thinking Hats analysis, business canvas etc., marketing strategy analysis of 4Ps, Six Sigma, Five forces model and so on. Below is an example shows how mind maps used in planning PESTLE model.

For Meeting Management

You may find that meetings in your workplace are everywhere which seem to be an essential part of all organizations. However, sometimes meetings are tedious which take up too much time without effective agreements and outcomes. Effective practices for a meeting need to be managed and coordinated by a productivity tool. At this time, the mind map as a brainstorming and productivity tool plays a vital role in holding a conference.

Under meeting management, two situations require mind maps most which are planning a conference and taking meeting minutes. When using mind maps for planning a conference, you ought to divide it into three stages – preparation, operating and after-conference. After that, you could explore to make this meeting full of details so as to avoid urgent situations. While for recording a meeting, a mind map can help you organize in real time with efficiency. By dragging and dropping what you note down after the meeting, you could have a structural minute mind map which is easy to generate a report.

For Presentation Slideshow

As mind map is a great visualized illustration of information and really eye-catching to display, it is widely used in business presentations. Edraw MindMaster supports two slideshow views for more engaging business presentation slideshow. If you are familiar with traditional slide-based presentation mode, you can turn mind map branches into slide pages automatically in one click. While if you do not want a complete mind map to be parted, traverse presentation mode can transit smoothly from one topic to another.

Source from https://www.edrawsoft.com/mindmaster/6-business-uses-mindmap.php